Bradley Cooper at a screening of American Hustle on Dec. 8, 2013. Cooper will be playing a different kind of cop in the upcoming thriller 'Dark Invasion.' Photo: onica Schipper/Getty Images for Grey Goose

Bradley Cooper will look a lot different as a World War I-era NYPD captain than he did as a permed ’70s era FBI agent in “American Hustle.”

Warner Bros. just bought the rights to the Howard Blum thriller “Dark Invasion,” due from HarperCollins on Feb. 11, and Cooper is attached to star as NYPD Capt. Tom Tunney. Cooper is also producing the film with John Lesher.

“It’s a true story about the hunt for the first terrorist cell in America,” Blum told me. “It’s 1915 and a cell of German spies are spreading anthrax, and they explode a bomb in the US Capitol Building and shoot the nation’s richest man, J.P. Morgan Jr. A special squad of New York cops, headed by Tunney, is formed to hunt them down. And it’s all true.”

In a pre-publication review, Kirkus called it “masterful” and “engaging.”

The screenplay is by Taylor Sheridan, who played Deputy Hale on the TV show “Sons of Anarchy” before he turned to writing.